AI search is changing local discovery. Here's what to do.

What's actually changing

For 20 years, "getting found" meant ranking on Google. You optimized your Google Business Profile, you chased reviews, you maybe paid for some keywords. Customers searched, Google showed them a list of 10, they picked one.

AI search collapses that 10-result list into a 3-result conversational answer. The customer doesn't see who else was considered. They don't scroll. They get a short paragraph that names a few businesses and moves on.

Two consequences nobody is talking about loudly enough:

• Zero-click is the norm now. In Google search, even when customers don't click, you at least see your listing show up in their search results. In ChatGPT, you don't even get the impression. The customer asked, the AI answered, you weren't in it. You'll never know it happened.
• Three slots, not ten. AI answers tend to name 3–5 businesses, not 10. Fewer slots means higher stakes. Being "the 8th-best taco place in Austin" was fine on Google. On ChatGPT, there's no 8th place.

Where AI search gets its answers

There's no single source. Different AI tools blend different inputs, but the patterns are converging:

• Structured data on your website. AI models read JSON-LD schema markup — small chunks of code in your site's HTML — far more reliably than they read prose. If your site has LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, hours, and category, AI can answer questions about you confidently. Without it, AI is guessing from whatever it scraped.
• The platforms that index the web. Most AI tools rely on Bing's index under the hood — including ChatGPT, Copilot, and DuckDuckGo Assist. If Bing can't find you, those tools can't either. Apple Intelligence pulls heavily from Apple Maps. Your Google Business Profile alone is no longer the full story.
• Review aggregators. Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and similar are high-signal sources for AI. If you have a strong Yelp page, AI tools are more likely to surface you for decision-style queries ("best," "most authentic," etc.).
• Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two carry disproportionate weight in every major LLM. They're part of the training data and they show up in retrieval. If you have a Wikipedia page — most SMBs don't — that's a near-permanent advantage.
• Your raw website content. AI crawlers read your homepage and any pages they can index. Butthey generally don't run JavaScript. If your site is built on Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow and renders the important info via JS, AI may see only the unrendered shell — basically nothing.

What's settled, what's speculative

The space is new enough that you should be skeptical of anyone selling certainty. There's a flood of "AI SEO consultants" right now claiming they know exactly how Perplexity ranks restaurants. They don't. Nobody outside the LLM companies does, and the rules change every model release.

What's actually settled:

• Structured data (schema markup) helps. Every major LLM reads it.
• Server-side rendered content is required. JS-rendered content is mostly invisible to AI crawlers.
• Consistency across Google, Apple, Bing, and Yelp builds trust signals. Conflicting hours, phone numbers, or addresses make AI less confident in surfacing you.
• FAQ sections with real Q&A pairs are lifted directly into AI answers more than other content formats.

What's speculative:

• Exactly how each LLM ranks competing businesses. We observe patterns; nobody can promise a result.
• Whether llms.txt (a new convention, sort of like robots.txt for AI crawlers) will matter long-term. Anthropic publishes one. Vercel does. Most SMB sites don't. Worth having; nobody knows yet how much it moves the needle.
• Whether paying for "AI optimization" services is worth it. Most are repackaging standard SEO advice.

Six things you can check this week

None of these require an AI consultant. All of them are things you can verify yourself in under an hour.

1. Does your website have LocalBusiness schema markup? Right-click your homepage, "View Page Source," search for @type or LocalBusiness. If nothing comes up, you're invisible to AI in a way that's easy to fix.
2. Does your homepage render without JavaScript? Disable JavaScript in your browser (Chrome: Settings → Privacy → Site Settings → JavaScript → Don't allow), then load your site. Can you see your business name, hours, phone, and what you do? If most of it is blank, AI crawlers see the same blank.
3. Is your business on Bing Places? Search bing.com/maps for your business name. If you're not there, claim it. ChatGPT, Copilot, and several other AI tools silently use Bing's index.
4. Is your business on Apple Maps? Apple Intelligence (built into iPhones running iOS 18+) pulls heavily from Apple Maps. Most SMB owners forget it exists because they don't use iPhones, or don't check.
5. Do you have an FAQ section? Even three real Q&A pairs on your site ("Do you take reservations?", "Is parking free?", "Do you have vegetarian options?") give AI tools clean, extractable answers.
6. Try the search yourself. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews separately. Ask each: "best [your category] in [your city]." See if you're mentioned. Also ask: "tell me about [your business name]." See what each one knows about you. This is the closest thing to a ground-truth check available today.

Why we're writing about this

Most SMB owners don't have time to follow the AI space. They're running a restaurant or a salon or a repair shop. Two years from now, AI search will be the way half of new-customer discovery happens. The owners who set the basics up early will keep their share. The ones who didn't know it was happening will quietly lose it.

Part of our job — beyond the agents we sell — is to keep you informed about the shifts that matter for the kind of business you run. The basics in this article would've been an obscure SEO consultant's billable line item two years ago. Now they're table stakes. We'll keep writing the next ones as they emerge.